Introduction
There is a whole industry devoted to data visualization and many books written about it and for good reasons. I would not have thought not many people can do it from a spreadsheet but data presented as a graph, chart or pictogram makes it easier to analyze, to spot trends and patterns.
There are hundreds of website data visualization tools around. I happen to like the Google Charts API, sometimes known as the Google Visualization API, and these pages were written to answer some common questions about using the API and to give solutions to problems I have encountered when using it.
The API and Support
The Google Visualization API was announced in March 2008, and can be found at https://developers.google.com/chart. The documentation is usually very good with plenty of examples.
The API has its own user-supported forum or group at https://groups.google.com/g/google-visualization-api. A general Google query including "Google Chart" or "Google Visualization" (including the quotes) will generally bring up several results usually from Stack Overflow.
Pros
- Lots of documentation
- Easy to produce charts from the examples
- Charts are interactive
- Charts are customizable using CSS
- Free (but not open source)
- Data can come from a variety of sources
- Cross browser compatible
- Has dedicated help forum
Cons
- The libraries cannot be run from your server, they must be run from Google's
- Some documentation is not very clear
- Some knowledge of JavaScript is needed
- Can be tricky exporting the charts as an image, especially vector types
- Cannot test the charts, at least the ones created from Google Sheets, on a web page locally, they must be on a web server or Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) errors will be generated.
Live Examples
These examples are used on live website pages:
AWStats annual statistics
Eclipse Foundation LocationTech Activity
Favourites on the Free Music Archive
HMS Gambia crewlist
Sea-level Data Analysis and Visualization - Most of the charts are drawn with PHP and so the source is hidden, but some charts such as Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Levels, 1800–present are not and the script used to create them is viewable by looking at the source code.
Valences of characters and institutions in newspapers
Wappalizer - Uses it to chart technologies on websites
Webring List
Webring Statistics
Webring Timeline
Other pages in this section
Using Google Sheets as a data source
Get and set data in a datatable
Calculations
Clickable Charts
CSV file as data source
Multiple Axes in a chart
Saving a Chart as an Image
Multiple Charts on a Page
Tables: Adding Links
Tables: Tooltips & Popups
Tables: Using Dates
Timelines
Formatting Tooltips
Transpose Data